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We're All At Least a Little Gay

Hold onto your bra straps ladies, because a new study from
the University of Essex has concluded that most women are either bisexual or gay but never, ever straight.

Now, before you either text your husband, banish the
messenger to hell or suddenly feel a little bit normal, hear what they have
to say:

Lead researcher Gerulf Rieger surveyed 345 female participants by analyzing their pupil dilation and genital
arousal when shown videos of naked men and women. The study found lesbians' pupils indicated they were (unsurprisingly) much more attracted to women. But what was unexpected: all the participants were "at least a little bit turned on by other ladies, even if they identified as fans of the wang," the Times reported.

The subjects were women ranging in age, level of education
and ethnicity. They were asked to identify themselves as straight, mostly
straight, bi-sexual, mostly bi-sexual, bisexual-leaning (never heard of this one
before) lesbian or mostly lesbian.

The results found that the women who identified themselves
as heterosexual were strongly aroused by videos of both good-looking men and
women.

Don't believe this study? Well, there was another study done
on women's sexual fluidity by Meredith Chivers, who found that women were
turned on by quite a bit—like, basically everything.

[L]ooking at a naked man walking on the beach is about as exciting for women as looking at landscapes.

Again, men and women had their private parts hooked up to
instruments and then were shown different images.

"Subjects watched clips of heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a naked man walking on a beach, a naked woman exercising and bonobos, a species of ape, mating—sound effects were dubbed in," Chivers wrote in her study, published in the Queens Journal

She says in "Bi the Way," her documentary about bisexuality that, at least according to the arousal stats, looking at a naked man walking on the beach is about as exciting for women as looking at
landscapes.

Yikes!

"Women physically don't
seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least
heterosexual women don't," she said. "For heterosexual women, gender didn't
matter. They responded to the level of activity."

Dr. Chivers' work adds
to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a
continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an
either-or phenomenon.

"She's pinpointing what's kind of obvious, and yet unexplored: that women are so fluid in their sexuality," one of the directors of "Bi the Way," Josephine Decker, said in the Queens Journal report.

So what's going on? Well, some reason that there's an evolutionary component to all of this.

"[W]omen might become more easily aroused than men in general because of an 'evolutionary mechanism meant to prevent genital trauma.' In the evolution of humans, if not mammals, females have been in many situations where sex was forced on them," Rieger told Mic.com. "To become aroused quickly to any sexual situation could mean lubrication, and ... it might have been beneficial for women to respond to any sexual situation with some level of arousal."

Women often connect emotions with desire, I think. I mean, let's just say if our man is there for us, we are there for them.

But not everyone's convinced. There are also those who argue the test left out too many variables to be conclusive. And that researchers didn't address certain facts.

"...[I]t's generally more socially acceptable for women to self-identify as bisexual than it is for men, due in no small part to cultural tropes that fetishize women having sex with other women," Mic.com's Jenny Kutner, who reported on the research, argues. "Such tropes, combined with the idea that women in general are more likely to be objectified than men, might play a role in conditioning women to respond to other female bodies with sexual arousal, regardless of whether they self-identify as straight or gay."

I don't know. Women often connect emotions with desire, I think. I mean, let's just say if our man is there for us, we are there for them.

As we know having kids and marriage is a little stressful. Who ends up being there for us? Our friends. Who are most often women.

Actually, I have no clue, but this test seems to say so. So rock on and all that, but it does indeed confirm that we women are full of new daily mysteries. But, if you're a woman, you already know that.